Steve Jones is the editor of SQLServerCentral.com and visits a wide variety of data related topics in his daily editorial. Steve has spent years working as a DBA and general purpose Windows administrator, primarily working with SQL Server since it was ported from Sybase in 1990. You can follow Steve on Twitter at twitter.com/way0utwest

I had a Sidekick for awhile, and my son has one as well. I thought it was a great device when I had it, with an easy to use keyboard, and some nice features. I'm not sure how they've changed since the Sidekick III, but now that I've had an Android phone, and an iPhone, I think it's way behind the features in those devices.

I suppose some people will spin this as Microsoft not necessarily having the expertise to run these servers, but that's silly. Microsoft bought Danger, who presumably had the talent to administer these. They were at the data center they've been hosted at for some time, which also likely has talent there to help out.

What was amazing is that Microsoft didn't try to spin the PR on this and say this was an Oracle or Sun issue. They left it alone, letting plenty of people blame MS software and use this as an example of why Microsoft software is poorly written.

But was it MS software?

This report says that Microsoft may have been attempting to move the service, and that's certainly possible. Maybe they were to blame and didn't want to raise that issue.

I don't know that a root cause will ever be reached, but I can definitely see T-Mobile moving the Sidekick brand to an Android phone. It's a better OS, it saves them $$, and they consolidate some of their own support.

This does show that the cloud is an issue. I have my devices sync with Google on the cloud for various things, but it keeps copies locally. Something everyone needs to do with cloud services.

Comments

Posted by Anonymous on 25 October 2009

This post was mentioned on Twitter by sql_joker: SSC Blog - Not Pointing Fingers - Microsoft and Sidekicks: Someone posted a note on Twitter about the.. http://bit.ly/24RWVu